A Bright Future for FreePBX

Over 4 years ago, FreePBX, then known as AMP, started a course to disrupt the traditional PBX market by changing the game on the existing black box telephone industry. In this short time the Open Source process has been able to surpass what has taken the industry decades to accomplish. With millions of downloads, an installed base counted in the hundreds of thousands, and almost every successful Open Source PBX distribution basing itself off of FreePBX, our project has clearly proven itself as a leader in this telephony revolution!

I am very happy with the great community we have fostered and without whom we could never have come this far. This community has stuck with us and continued to grow stronger despite the challenges our project has seen such as frivolous forks of our work for none of the good reasons that sometimes require such actions.

I have remained focused on driving stability into our project while expanding its ever growing feature set and encouraging the growth of the development community and feel we have been very successful in these endeavors. I always strive to lead this project with the community’s best interest in mind and today’s announcement is precisely for that.

Part of assuring the success of FreePBX is to make sure that we continue to have strong leadership, community participation and a thriving eco-system of users and partners. I would like to announce a new partnership that will help the project tremendously. I have joined forces with Bandwidth.com as their Open Source Community Director, where we will be devoting significant resources and effort to expand the scope of FreePBX while protecting its charter to make sure it remains open and strong.

There are a number of reasons why I chose Bandwidth.com, which I trust you will see play out in the coming weeks, months and years. Bandwidth.com is a high quality VoIP and Data Service Provider interested in assuring the FreePBX project continues its success. They sell VoIP and Data services, not PBX software – they want that to be free. Bandwidth.com has done some exciting pioneering work with FreeSWITCH and we are very excited to see how that work can live along side FreePBX as it has the potential to bring together some very vibrant communities to all of our benefit. We are currently digging through the various Open Source licensing options so that we can release these contributions to the community.

Bandwidth.com has already made an important move to help protect our project several months ago when the FreePBX trademark (which I never owned or controlled) was being shopped around to parties that did not have this project’s best interest in mind. Bandwidth.com preemptively purchased the trademark, with my knowledge, in order to assure FreePBX was not jeopardized.

This is a culmination of months of discussions and it is one I have not taken alone. Several key developers and contributors to the FreePBX project have acted as advisers during this process to make sure I am taking us down the right course. I feel very energized that this is the beginning of something great. As we continue the project’s success we will strive to grow the participation of the eco-system that surrounds FreePBX which includes other Open Source projects and industrial partners who are all key to our continued growth!

Please join me in welcoming Bandwidth.com and keep an eye on what’s to come!